August 19, 2014

Fizzy cold brewed coffee? There's a few commercial cold brewed coffees emerging on the on market, and we thought carbonating some cold brew of our own could be an interesting experiment. Anyone that's drank soda that's gone flat knows what a significant role carbonation plays in how it tastes. Bringing that added ZING to cold brew could be a welcomed addition to an already refreshing beverage.

Carbonation

You can carbonate just about anything. Seriously. Even ice-cream! On top of that, there's numerous ways to carbonate. Carbonation is the process of dissolving carbon dioxide (CO2) gas into a liquid. To do this, an air-tight container with liquid is pressurized with carbon dioxide, and the pressure forces the carbon dioxide to dissolve into the liquid. When the container is opened (de-pressurized) the dissolved CO2 comes out of solution forming bubbles and creates the fizz we're familiar with.

The two primary methods to carbonate are:

Forced Carbonation

Natural Carbonation

Forced carbonation Set-up

In forced carbonation shown above, CO2 is supplied by a highly pressurized cylinder containing the gas. This is the method I use when carbonating my home brewed beer, and it's the method used by the popular sodastream soda maker. Unfortunately, it's a bit equipment intensive...

Natural Carbonation Set-up

In natural carbonation, yeast is introduced to the liquid. As these microorganisms converts the fermentable sugars in the liquid, CO2 is produced as a byproduct. Alcohol is another byproduct. However, due to the relatively short fermentation time required to carbonate, you can expect less than 1% alcohol content.

Natural carbonation requires very little in the way of equipment (as shown in the picture above), so we're going to use this method to carbonate our cold brew in this experiment. I've adapted the below recipe from a really great book on making home-made sodas called True Brews. The recipe can be found here.

What you need:

16oz cold brew coffee at room temp.

1/32 teaspoon Dry Champagne yeast (~0.1 grams)

0.9 oz of granulated sugar

16-20 oz empty plastic soda bottle

Champagne yeast can be found at your local home brew supply stores or here on Amazon. The amount required is minuscule for a 16oz batch. It's a little difficult to measure if you don't have a gram scale and I don't think 1/32 sized measuring teaspoons are even made, but just a pinch of it between your fingers should be about right. Also, champagne yeast is chosen for it's taste neutrality.

White granular sugar is used to give the yeast something to ferment. The amount you use will influence the final sweetness of the carbonated cold brew.

Step 1. Add the cold brew to the yeast and sugar in the bottle. Leave about 1 inch of headspace at the top.

Step 2. Seal container and shake!

Step 3. Leave in warm location for 12-48 hours.

After some time, you'll notice the increasing pressure in the bottle when you try to squeeze the sides. The firmness is a good gauge of how carbonated your cold brew will be. Once it's nice and firm, you can put it in the refrigerator to stop the fermentation process and prevent it from over carbonating.

After about 18 hours, our bottle had become firm to the squeeze, so we opened it up and poured ourselves a cup of cold brew. Compared to a soda, It was lightly carbonated, which gave it an interesting effervescent mouth feel. Very different from the cold brew we're used to drinking.

That fizzy-ness definitely gave it more of a bite. That smooth, less acidic taste we're familiar with seemed to be supplanted by the carbonation. In this batch, we definitely noticed the added sweetness from the sugar. It was a little too sweet for my tastes, and I'd try using less sugar in the next batch, or I'd let it ferment longer (at the risk of over-carbonating).

Bottom line

This makes for a super easy way to experiment with carbonated cold brew. I'd recommend trying it out. It's definitely not how i'd like to drink cold brew every day, but I could see it being a nice change once in a while. It could be interesting to start adding some other ingredients so that the cold brewed coffee is playing a more supporting role. Maybe something alcoholic? What ever it is, I'd probably leave the milk out of it though.

Let us know how your experiments turn out!

Bruer LLC

Author

13 Responses

Carroll Himmel

January 08, 2019

Hi!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST consumers look at your review pages before visiting and ordering at your business.
Over 60% of them check Google first! We feel that your site could use a little help at Google and SiteJabber.

Most consumers avoid leaving reviews until they have a BAD experience to vent!
We have just the team from US/Canada to come up with great reviews you need.
Our services help keep at least a 4.0 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

Leandro Loftis

December 16, 2018

Hi!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST customers look at your review pages before visiting and buying at your business.
Over 63% of them check Google first! We feel that your site could use a little help at Google and Facebook.

Most clients avoid leaving reviews until they have a BAD experience to share!
We have just the team from United States/Canada to come up with great reviews you are looking for.
Our services help keep at least a 4.0 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

Samuel Severance

December 13, 2018

Hello!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST clients look at your review pages before visiting and spending at your business.
Over 60% of them check Google first! We feel that you could use a little boost at Google and SiteJabber.

Most consumers avoid leaving reviews unless they have a BAD experience to share!
We have just the team from USA/Canada to come up with great reviews you need.
Our services help maintain at least a 4 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

We provide reliable Google, SiteJabber, TrustPilot, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Zomato, YellowPages reviews in bulk, starting at $20 in as little as 5 business days!

Check out our work and happy clients here:
http://bit.ly/ormworks

Thank you for your time,

Have a great day.
Samuel

Tandy Dorn

December 05, 2018

Hello!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST clients look at your review pages before visiting and spending at your business.
Over 63% of them check Google first! We feel that you could use a little help at Google and TrustPilot.

Most consumers avoid leaving reviews unless they have a BAD experience to share!
We have just the team to come up with great reviews you are looking for.
Our services help keep at least a 4.0 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

Fatima Pettiford

November 27, 2018

Hello!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST consumers look at your review pages before visiting and spending at your business.
Over 63% of them check Google first! We feel that your site could use a little help at Google and YellowPages.

Most clients avoid leaving a review unless they have a POOR experience to share!
We have just the team from United States/Canada to come up with great reviews you are looking for.
Our services help keep at least a 4 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

Tahlia Hankinson

November 24, 2018

Hi!

Nice alcohol content you have on your site. You know, MOST customers look at your review pages before visiting and spending at your business.
Over 60% of them check Google first! We feel that your site could use a little help at Google and SiteJabber.

Most consumers avoid leaving a review until they have a BAD experience to share!
We have just the team from USA/Canada to come up with great reviews you are looking for.
Our services help keep at least a 4.0 star rating in order to avoid losing business to competitors!

Douglaspyday

Simon Pym

March 15, 2018

What would happen if you fermented it for a longer period of time?

Simon Pym

March 15, 2018

What would happen if you fermented it for a longer period of time?

Marius

May 06, 2017

Hello. I was interested in trying this out. Could you please give me a list of the equipment you have for the presurezied style. I want to try a few recepie with it. Perhaps even the website where you bought everything. I would really appreciate it.

Alison Hamilton

January 22, 2017

Hello my name is Alison Hamilton and I just wanted to drop you a quick note here instead of calling you. I discovered your Cold Bruer: Experiments with Carbonation | Bruer | Cold Brew Coffee Maker page and noticed you could have a lot more traffic. I have found that the key to running a successful website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your subject matter. There is a company that you can get keyword targeted visitors from and they let you try the service for free for 7 days. I managed to get over 300 targeted visitors to day to my website. http://kbbl.ir/my

Jeff

January 15, 2017

Thanks for the great post. Honestly coffee carbonation is so interesting, actually wrote a few posts about it over at
http://carbonatedcoffee.net

Also, I second Sharon’s question about nitrogen. This is honestly something that has a huge amount of potential too.

Sharon Turner

April 19, 2015

Thanks for this post! Have been playing around with different carbonation methods and posted about it here http://magiccoffeetruck.com/bloom/coffee-drunk/

Am curious if you’ve messed around with the nitrogen infused method as well? That’s obviously something that wouldn’t be easy to test at home but I know some shops in town are getting into it.